Lessons in Learning: Ways to address the impact of mobility among Aboriginal students
The high-school completion rate for Aboriginal students continues to fall well short of the Canadian average. Recent research has highlighted student mobility as a major barrier to successful high-school completion. Low completion rates among Aboriginal students in families who move more frequently point to the need for greater school support for these students.
Two elementary schools will be closed this year. A third school is slated for closure and relocation next year. The district is also considering turning the two high schools into one administrative unit with two campuses.
Prince Rupert School District has experienced a 16% drop in enrollment over the past few years.
Read the review document here.
School closures and the ‘cult of efficiency’
By Murray Dobbin
The closure of public schools in BC has reached crisis level and is unprecedented in the history of BC. Enrolment has dropped in the past, and some schools are always closed in such situations, but the extent of the closures this time around is unique and the callous attitude of the provincial government has no precedent. The current raft of closures—150 since 2001 and 45 more scheduled for this year—is rationalized by declines in enrolment. But there is a much stronger driving force behind these permanent losses of schools and school property and that is the ideology of the current provincial government. The application of neo-liberal ideology (or radical free-market ideology) is at the root of this tragic loss of schools and the devastation it causes students, parents, neighbourhoods, and communities.
With a building that’s too small and not wired for today’s high-tech gadgets, University Hill is ranked the best public high school in B.C. by the Fraser Institute
Janet Steffenhagen, Vancouver Sun
Published: Saturday, May 10, 2008A small, run-down school bursting with students on Vancouver’s west side continues to be the public education leader in the annual Fraser Institute’s Report Card on B.C. Secondary Schools, released today.
University Hill has been ranked as the number-one public high school in B.C. for several years, bested only by independent schools that charge hefty tuition fees and generally admit only the best of the brightest.
It manages this feat despite serious overcrowding due to new housing developments on the nearby University of B.C. campus. The school’s capacity is 325 students, but it accommodates — through the use of nine portables — more than 500 teenagers and turns away several dozen more from its catchment area every year.
I have been asked numerous times now if I joking or if I am serious regarding my alternative proposal for the UBC-Dunbar EFR-Phase 1 plan that would close and sell Queen Elizabeth Annex in order to meet the serious need for an additional elementary and a rebuild high school in the neighbourhod. My alternative plan (see here) called for using the old U. Hill Secondary as an elementary school and shifting students eastward in a cascading effect ending at Tupper Secondary.
Am I serious?
Am I joking?
I suppose it says something about the situation we are experiencing here. It says something about our lack of hope that we will have a school. It says something about the length of time that we have patiently waited. It says something about the many promises we have been given that evaporate just as a solution seems in hand.
The ‘joke,’ if there is one here, is that our students do not have a proper school. We live in one of the richest nations of the world. We live in the midsts of a major economic boom. Why can’t the powers that be find the courage and the will power to do what is right? In the face of inaction alternatives such as shifting several thousands high school students eastward become ‘serious’ in the face of the absurdity.
BCTF Information Services — Research & Reports: Declining Enrolment in Ontario
BC is not alone in declining enrolments as this report from Ontario clearly documents.
Save Garibaldi Annex!: Victory!
After dragging the process out for over a year the Vancouver School Board has deferred, yet again, the closing of the Garibaldi Annex. The school, with an enrollment of 41 students, has been given a reprieve of two years to boast the number of students from 41 to 77.
In isolation the proposal is effective and inspiring for all people who support keeping all schools currently on the books. In the wider context of next fall’s school board election and the current proposal to close Queen Elizabeth Annex on the well-off west side the school board’s decision seems to imply that no schools will be shut down.
No one envies trustees having to make hard decisions in the face of dozens of young children, their parents, and musical acts. In the long run keeping as many small schools as possible open is a good idea. Every child needs to have the privilege of going to school in a place where they are known by name and as a person. In the larger elementary schools of 500-600 and more the annex type experience is only a faint dream. I think that one wold be more excited if the decision Monday night was part of a wider plan to downsize all of the existing elementary schools so that no school was larger than 250 students.
Congratulations to the Garibaldi community and, by extension, to the Queen Elizabeth Annex parents who can now point out that there are no supportable grounds for closing any school in the district.
Let’s hope that the district can find a way to rebuild schools that are needed.
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See Janet Steffenhagen’s blog on the same subject with some similar conclusions.
Wired & Free: online education advocate
A BC public school parent and advocate celebrates and defends online schools, a.k.a. distributed learning — and looks for others to join her cause.
Nanaimo Edutopia: The Saddest Day in the History of K-12 education in Nanaimo
Closing schools is a difficult decision to make. In Nanaimo the Board of Education was able to make a hard decision that will contribute to better over all school facilities.